CW&Thttp://cwandt.com
Fri, 27 Feb 2015 03:03:23 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Time Since Launchhttp://cwandt.com/time-since-launch/
http://cwandt.com/time-since-launch/#commentsTue, 24 Feb 2015 01:23:31 +0000http://cwandt.com/?p=1946
A single use long scale stopwatch.]]>When John Glenn went into space and became the first American to orbit Earth, the only piece of technology he chose to wear other than the space suit itself, was a 12 hour stopwatch. While orbiting Earth, John Glenn crossed time zones every 20 minutes. Tracking stations across the globe synchronized their clocks with Glenn’s stopwatch creating a new time zone out of necessity. Set your own Mission Elapsed Time (MET) with Time Since Launch.

Particle jamming is amazing. Take a balloon, fill it with some granular media like uncooked rice or beans and suck the air out with a vacuum. The balloon stiffens and holds its shape. The stiffness of the bladder is easy to manipulate and quickly changes from a completely floppy state to something as hard as a rock. The higher the vacuum, the stiffer the jamming bladder becomes. Of course, the granular media that you put inside the bladder also affects its performance. Fill a balloon with jelly and it’ll remain relatively malleable even with a high pressure vacuum. On the other hand, if it’s filled with glass marbles, you’ll won’t be able to shift its shape whatsoever once a high vacuum is pulled. That’s the magic of particle jamming.

With that little piece of magic, we developed a process to create custom molds for thin shell casting using various granular media. We worked with two primary variables. The granular media and the shape of the bladder. The thin shell casts take on the form of the shaped bladder as well as the granular media, crystallizing the intricate texture created by the relatively coarse grain. Choice of granular media affects the stiffness of the bladder, the stiffness of the cast, and the texture of the cast. Glass marbles casts have a stiff structure with a hexagonal pattern of craters while rice creates a fragile structure with an irregular speckled texture.

Unlike traditional hard molds, casting into a jammed mold can have undercuts since the bladder returns to a soft state when air is supplied back into the bladder. With this small advantage, jamming bladders can be freely shaped with folds and undercuts that are difficult to achieve with hard molds.

The following are the steps to our process:
Build a custom latex bladder
Fill the bladder with coarse granular media
Pull a vacuum at 15” Hg
Shape the bladder by hand
Increasing the vacuum to 20-28” Hg
Cast Hydrostone or Hydrocal FGR-95 to coat the surface of the hardened form
Rotate the mold to evenly coat the surface until the material hardens
Wait for the cast material to harden
Let the air back into the bladder
Remove the cast

To assist the thin shell casting process, we built a rotation sequencer to spin the jamming bladders. The vacuum airway is piped through the spinning shaft, so continuous rotation in either direction is possible without tangling tubes. Its motion is programmed by manually rotating the wheel while in recording mode, then in playback mode, the recorded motion is repeated indefinitely. The idea was to direct the uncured plaster to settle in some areas by inserting pauses while rotating the piece to coat the rest of the mold evenly.

Crowsflight keeps you on track in the direction of your destination, but frees you to discover exciting distractions along the way. It is perfect for wandering around cities, especially without a data connection.

By combining location data (GPS) with the compass, Crowsflight provides mapless navigation in an intuitive, glance-at-it kind of way.

No instructions, maps to read or paths to follow. It’s a lot like asking for directions on the street. A friendly finger pointing in the right direction is often all the help you need.

Crowsflight uses only GPS to navigate. You can search for destinations on the fly if you have a data connection. If you don’t, load up all your destinations before you set out for the day. Once you’ve loaded all the places you want to go, you don’t need data anymore. It’s perfect for wandering around foreign cities.

Search for a new destination by address or placename

List view shows your relative distance to each location, so you can see how places compare (distances are scaled logarithmically, so shorter distances show greater difference)

TV+Wheelbarrow-ish stand = TV Barrow
We love watching movies in bed, but we also love watching stuff in the living room. To fulfill both loves, we built a wheelbarrow for our screen so we could easily move it around and maneuver up and down small steps.

The 700c road bike wheel is attached to a bicycle fork. The rest of the parts are machined aluminum connections that fit around standard 1″ aluminum tubes. Each component is secured with set screws so the legs are collapsible and the tilt of the screen is adjustable.

Apesnake Photobooth is face and mouth detection photobooth built in openFrameworks using Kyle McDonald’s FaceOSC. A webcam detects a single face, tracks it’s position, and calculates the width and height of it’s mouth. When the eyes and mouth match our desired expression (in this case, the Manwolf face), the software triggers a Canon 1000D to take a photo and play an ape shriek. Photos are saved with a high resolution locally and automatically uploaded to Apesnake Manwolf’s Facebook Photos Page.

]]>http://cwandt.com/apesnake-photobooth/feed/024 bit RGB CPTCRhttp://cwandt.com/24-bit-rgb-cptcr/
http://cwandt.com/24-bit-rgb-cptcr/#commentsFri, 04 Nov 2011 09:58:20 +0000http://cwandt.com/?p=1480
24 bit RGB colour palette time corrupt reconstruction is part of a series of software pieces that model the relationship between time and computer processes.]]>Timing is integral to communication. When a signal is transmitted between two discrete entities, whether it is between components of computer hardware or individuals talking, timing sets up a context that makes a signal relevant and possible to understand.

Google Earth Clock is a web-based digital clock assembled from views of Earth from above that resemble numbers. Each view zooms in and out, weaving the unfamiliar to the familiar. Every half minute, the views jump to a new location revealing a digit that may be a building or terrain in a foreign place, but as we zoom out, we begin to associate it with familiar landscapes, discernible shapes of countries, and the distinct view of our planet. [Launch Google Earth Clock]